News Around the World


USA Fifty years on When Seahorse first hit the streets 500 issues ago it’s unlikely those streets had anyone driving on the right side of the road. But I’m pretty sure within a few issues and some high-profile events like the Admiral’s, Kenwood and Sardinia Cups, not to mention various Ton Cups, the SORC and any other high-profile IOR racing happening around the world, this activity started to appear in the pages of Seahorse and spark interest in the US scene. Particularly so among those who had invested their blood and treasure in this game and wanted to see how others were doing the same in an era without instant telecommunications, and other magazines with pretty photos and generic stories were just not enough: they wanted some meat with their potatoes. But was this happening in reverse – were Seahorse readers


aware of the scene in the US when the magazine was still young in the early 1980s? Maybe the editor knows more about this… Regardless and to put a scale on this, according to Emeritus


ORC chief measurer Nicola Sironi, the USA had thousands of IOR certificates issued to boats sailing in all but the most basic level of club racing: all the major regattas on all coasts were using the IOR system and, while production boats got measured and rated for IOR, the framework was in place to have new custom boats designed and built as well. This higher level of commitment to custom projects was mostly regional: except for speciality boats like Maxis, orders for new projects were usually made to not only the name brand designers like Frers or Holland but to up-and-coming local-based designers and builders who were within easier reach of owners who wanted to monitor progress. Where I grew up in southern California the early 1980s already


had Doug Peterson well-established from the success that started with Ganbare years earlier, and was then bolstered by help from John Reichel and Jim Pugh. Bruce Nelson and Bruce Marek were relatively new but already finding clients in boats ranging from Quarter Tonners to Two Tonners and eventually by the mid-1980s


22 SEAHORSE


over into the production sector with Morgan Yachts. Further north in the Bay area Gary Mull and Carl Schumacher were active with IOR-inspired projects, both in custom and series-built designs that were then produced by the numerous SoCal boatbuilders. The US was also very much involved in rating rule management:


from 1979 to 1987 Gary Mull was the Chairman of the ORC Inter- national Technical Committee that developed and maintained the IOR. Olin Stephens was also an active member of this committee. Meanwhile, down in Santa Cruz the indigenous design and build


culture was finding traction with Bill Lee’s ‘Fast is Fun’ concept – light boats with clean lines that ran counter to the IOR ‘lead mines’ – which was embraced by other designer-builders like George Olsen and Ron Moore. It was also in Santa Cruz in 1980 that Bob Thompson at C&B


Marine built a lovely fractional-rigged 38-footer cold-moulded in Port Orford cedar and spruce for LA-based Larry Harvey, who was attracted to the concept of having a fast cruiser-racer, which he raced to Hawaii then stayed on that year to race the Clipper Cup. The designer of Timberwolf was well-known down under and


starting to get interest in Europe, but this was one of his first commissions in the US. It was not until a year later that Bruce Farr and Russ Bowler moved from New Zealand to Annapolis to be closer to this growing international market. Elsewhere in Santa Cruz people were thinking about Bill Lee’s


Merlin crushing the Transpac course record in 1977 and the influ- ence it would have on first-to-finish designs in the mostly downwind genre of Pacific offshore races. With the IOR 70.0ft upper rating limit remaining firmly rooted in all racing, thoughts were turning towards a very different design target than the heavy IOR Maxis being built and sailed elsewhere on the planet. A notable exception was when in even years the IOR Maxis came


to visit the west coast for the Clipper (later Kenwood Cup) and San Francisco Big Boat Series – and occasionally the Transpac in odd years, although this stopped abruptly in 1983 for one good reason: ULDB Sleds.


PHIL UHL


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